In 1937, Paul Green put nib to paper and wrote a play titled
The Lost Colony. He needed no subtitle, for in American
popular history there is only one story by that name: In
July 1587, settlers under the governorship of John White and
the sponsorship of dashing Sir Walter Raleigh strode ashore
on Roanoke Island to establish the first permanent English
settlement in North America. A month later, White's daughter
gave birth to little Virginia Dare, the first English child
born on the continent. White sailed back to England to
procure additional supplies. He meant to return within
months but was beset by delays. Nearly three years elapsed.
When he finally landed on Roanoke's fair shore, the
colonists had mysteriously vanished. The only clues to their
whereabouts were the word "Croatoan" carved in a palisade,
and the letters "CRO" carved into a tree. They were never
found--the fabled Lost Colonists of Roanoke.

Green's play has run at the Waterside Theater on Roanoke for
64 straight summers. (In the 1940s, Walter Raleigh was
portrayed by Andy Griffith.) On its Web site, the theater
touts a "symphonic drama" with a "smart, young cast ... a
must-see event for vacationers, theater-goers, history
buffs, and those who enjoy a good romantic mystery." Lee
Miller (MA '87) would agree with the mystery part, but she
sees the story as more sinister than romantic: "This is the
quintessential American story. This is where American
history began. It didn't begin at Jamestown or at Plymouth,
it began here. It's also America's oldest murder
mystery."

Murder mystery? She must mean the murder of the colonists by
the Powhatan Indians. This has been the explanation of their
fate for 392 years. But that's not what Miller means. An
anthropologist by training and a consultant, television
writer, and author by trade, Miller became curious about
Roanoke four years ago and started reading. The more she
read, the more convinced she became that professional
historians and the public have been mistaken for nearly four
centuries. Roanoke wasn't "lost," Miller says--it was
sabotaged. Furthermore, she believes that while some of the
colonists did die at the hands of Indians (though not the
Powhatan), many survived, never to be rescued. Colonial
officials knew there were survivors but found the lie of
their murder more expedient.

Miller, 39, has published her theory and evidence in
Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony
(Arcade, 2001). She vigorously challenges the official
17th-century explanations, the work of eminent 20th-century
historian David Beers Quinn and more recent writers like
Giles Milton, and hundreds of years of American mythmaking.
She doesn't lack confidence. "I know that my book is a
benchmark," she says. "I wanted to take all the data and
just lay it out on the table without assumptions. An amazing
pattern emerges."

She mines this pattern to build a case that is meticulously
sourced and, if not proven, at least provocative: A cabal
masterminded by Sir Francis Walsingham, secretary of state
to Queen Elizabeth I, stranded the colonists on Roanoke in
the hope they would either starve, die at the hands of the
Indians, or be raided by the Spanish, who had been tipped
off about the new colony. The conspirators wanted to bring
down Raleigh, the Queen's golden boy who had received a
royal patent to all land he could settle in the New World.
Desperate but resourceful, the colonists left the island and
moved not up the Chesapeake Bay, as originally intended, but
west into the interior of what is now North Carolina to
await White's return. As if cursed, they had the misfortune
to wander straight into a conflict between Indian nations.
Some were probably killed, Miller believes, and some indeed
may have gone to the nearby friendly Indian settlement of
Croatoan, as their cryptic messages suggested. But many,
perhaps most, were taken as slaves and dispersed throughout
Carolina by way of an Indian trading network. This would
account for why no evidence of a Chesapeake settlement has
ever been found, Miller says, and for the many reports of
sightings throughout the interior, reports that historians
such as Quinn have long dismissed as rumor.

Says Miller, "It's inconceivable to me that all the data we
have, stating that not only were there Lost Colonists in the
interior but that search parties have actually met them at
close range, has just been thrown out." Quinn began
publishing his influential work in the 1940s. "For upwards
of 60 years we've had theories that just don't fit the data,
and all the data that we've had has just been tossed out.
That's not how you treat primary data."

I've always been fascinated by historical mysteries," Miller
says, "especially when people say you can't solve them. I'm
always convinced that the data has got to be out there
someplace."

As a Hopkins anthropology graduate student, she focused on
the Indian nations of the American Southeast. (She is of Kaw
Indian descent herself, though she dislikes mention of it on
her book's jacket.) After completing her master's in 1987,
she secured a grant that paid for a year on Roanoke Island
to study what happened to the Secotan, an Indian tribe that
by 1718 had disappeared from the historical record. "I used
to joke that everything connected with Roanoke Island
eventually disappears," she says. "It's a black hole."

Twelve miles long and three miles wide, Roanoke Island (not
to be confused with the city of Roanoke, Virginia) is wedged
between the Outer Banks and the mainland of North Carolina.
It is low, sandy, very pretty, and now home to about 2,500
people. While she was on the island, Miller lived across
from the site of the first colonial fort and couldn't stop
thinking about the English settlers. "That island is just
magical, just stunningly beautiful," she says. "I'd wander
around where I knew the colonists had been and think,
This is frustrating. There's got to be a way to find out
what happened to these people. I knew that most of the
work done had been undertaken by historians of British
colonial history, not by anyone with an expertise in the
Indian Southeast."

Professional opportunities occupied her for many years.
First the BBC hired her as a consultant for a documentary.
Then she became head of research for "500 Nations," an
eight-hour documentary on American Indians produced by Kevin
Costner. She established a career as a consultant on matters
related to American Indians, working for, among others, the
Library of Congress. Not until 1997 could she resume serious
study of Roanoke.

She read the earliest documents. "The thing that the Hopkins
anthropology department drills into you again and again is
primary accounts," says Miller. "Don't ever read a secondary
account." For her, the initial primary account was a long
letter by John White, the island's governor, published in
1600 by Richard Hakluyt in his collection Principall
Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the
English Nation. Historians have been hard on White.
Quinn called him paranoid, weak, and ineffective, and this
has been the portrait of White ever since. But as Miller
read his account, penned in 1593 as his explanation for what
had happened on Roanoke, she was made suspicious by a series
of mishaps that befell the three shiploads of colonists.

Within days of the expedition's departure from Plymouth,
England, for example, White's pilot, Simon Fernandez,
inexplicably ordered two of the ships to abandon the third
off the coast of Portugal. (Remarkably, the third ship, a
flyboat carrying colonists and essential supplies, did make
it to Roanoke days after the first two landed.) Once across
the Atlantic and in the Caribbean, the colonists needed to
take on fresh provisions and water, as well as salt for use
as a preservative; they failed on all three counts because--
according to White--Fernandez obstructed their efforts. The
colonists had to establish their settlement early enough in
the season to plant crops. Yet Fernandez wasted weeks
getting them to the Carolina coast. He spent days off Cape
Fear ostensibly trying to get his bearings, once nearly
grounding them, even though his skill as a pilot in these
waters was of such renown there was a section of the coast
named after him. The colonists didn't make it to Roanoke
until mid-July, too late to plant fields.

The settlers were to check on a garrison of 15 troops left
in 1585 to hold Roanoke after a previous expedition. They
were then to sail 100 miles up the Chesapeake Bay to
establish their colony on the mainland. Instead, after some
colonists were put ashore, Fernandez announced that everyone
would have to disembark and stay on Roanoke. Wrote White,
with bitter sarcasm, "a Gentleman by the means of Fernando
... called to the sailors in the pinnesse, charging them not
to bring any of the planters back againe, but leave them in
the island ... saying that the summer was far spent, where
he would land all the planters in no other place." The
colonists were being dumped where White knew they would have
difficulty sustaining a community of 117, where resupply
ships from England would not look for them, and where, to
their dismay, they found the garrison abandoned and partly
razed, the bones of one soldier, and no trace of the other
14.

None of this was accidental, in White's opinion. His letter
expressed his conviction that the colonists had been
sabotaged by Fernandez. Subsequent historians and writers
have noted Fernandez's actions but blamed White for not
standing up to the recalcitrant pilot. Giles Milton, in the
recently published pop history Big Chief Elizabeth,
states that White should have hanged Fernandez, noting
pointedly that a better man like Sir Francis Drake would
have done so. Quinn, critical of White, let Fernandez off as
"inscrutable."

Like Miller, Quinn read White's account. His response, in
Set Fair for Roanoke: Voyages and Colonies, 1584-
1606, was to chide White for spending "so much time
complaining about Fernandes [sic] ... that he did not give
us a more detailed portrait of the colonists." White's claim
of sabotage, Quinn wrote, "is somewhat hard to accept."

Miller, however, read White's claims and took them at face
value. This is the fundamental difference between her line
of inquiry and the work of preceding historians. Instead of
dismissing White's complaints as paranoia, she treated them
as primary data. "I didn't begin with the assumption that he
was right," she says. "I began with the primary data and
assumed any theory would have to be based on it. It's not
good science to throw out the primary documents and
substitute your own theory." This led her to some crucial
questions. Quinn et al. have attributed Fernandez's order to
strand the colonists on Roanoke to his desire to pursue
piracy before the Atlantic storm season set in. Were this
true, Miller asks, why would Fernandez have spent 36 days
anchored offshore, recaulking his ships and showing none of
the urgency that supposedly prevented him from taking the
colonists to their planned destination? And why, once he did
depart, did he not hunt for prizes but instead make a
beeline for England?

There was more that aroused her suspicion. Darby Glande, an
Irishman, deserted when the ships were docked in Puerto Rico
on the voyage to Roanoke. Glande, who in a later sworn
deposition claimed not to have deserted but to have been
told to leave, alerted the Spanish in Puerto Rico that
English colonists were on their way to "Jacan." He
identified the latitude of "Jacan" as 36 degrees--wrong for
Chesapeake Bay, but almost dead on for Roanoke (35 degrees,
54 minutes, 29 seconds). Why did Glande think Roanoke was
the destination, instead of farther north? "I thought, My
God ... somebody was doing this to them," Miller says. "The
minute I realized that White was telling us that there had
been sabotage, I remember thinking, Now if he's right--if
I'm going to take the primary data at face value and there
really was sabotage--then was there actually something wrong
with Roanoke Island?" Had the colonists been stranded on
Roanoke because someone knew it would be especially
dangerous?

The Lost Colony was actually the third English expedition to
Roanoke. Explorers, including John White (with Simon
Fernandez as pilot), had scouted the area three years
earlier in 1584. A 1585 expedition (also piloted by
Fernandez) had placed colonists on Roanoke Island, but after
10 months the settlers concluded that they had little chance
of success and voted to go back to England. To learn about
these previous ventures, Miller returned to Hakluyt's
Principall Navigations and to accounts and
correspondence by Ralph Lane of the 1585 venture. Lane was a
battle-hardened army officer who went to Roanoke to command
the 1585 colony. As Miller read his reports, she realized
that during his stint on the island, relations with the
local Secotan Indians had deteriorated from friendly mutual
curiosity to bloodshed.

First, disease introduced by the English ravaged the
Secotan; the English regarded this as retribution by God
against the heathen Indians. English troops torched an
Indian village after discovering that a silver cup was
missing from their camp. Lane seized food and hostages,
including a chief's young son. Finally, Lane led a
full-scale assault on the Secotan, who were quickly
overwhelmed. Two of Lane's men pursued and beheaded the
Secotan chief, Wingina.

Miller read these accounts as an ethnohistorian, and what
she found intrigued her. The 1585 expedition's scientist,
Thomas Hariot, had noted the Secotan referring to the
English in terms that to Miller sounded like a
windigo, a man-eating enemy who appears in northern
Algonquian cultures but previously had not been noted so far
south by anthropologists (the Secotan were Algonquian).
Miller's interpretation: The Secotan were calling Ralph Lane
a monster. So here were the poor Lost Colonists of 1587,
compatriots of people whom the Secotan had likened to
man-eating beasts, dumped in the midst of a nation that had
endured slaughter and disease at the hands of the previous
expedition.

But who could have harbored such animosity toward 117 people
as to maroon them on an island that couldn't sustain them,
in the midst of terrified, hostile Indians? Miller decided
that she needed to know much more about 16th-century London
to understand the context of what she had begun to regard as
a conspiracy. "I read a lot of biographies that were written
in the day," she says. "I decided for primary material I
would restrict myself to anything from the 1500s and
anything from the first quarter of the 1600s. I read Robert
Naunton and John Aubrey, who were writing about the people
in the royal court. Also, I read everything I could about
Simon Fernandez."

Fernandez is a puzzling figure. He was not only the 1587
expedition's pilot, but one of 13 investors in the venture,
called "assistants." Why would he have sabotaged his own
investment? Was he secretly in league with the Spanish, who
were eager to thwart any English incursion into what they
had claimed as their territory? Perhaps, but Fernandez was
Portuguese, and the Spanish had seized his native Azores
Islands. Furthermore, Spain had issued statements
identifying him as an enemy. Did he have a grudge against
Raleigh? None that Miller could find. She says, "The crux of
my whole theory comes down to explain Fernandez.
According to state papers, he was once almost hanged for
being a pirate, and Walsingham had saved him. And I thought,
Walsingham?"

Sir Francis Walsingham was the queen's secretary of state, a
powerful member of the English royal court. Walsingham,
Miller deduced, had ample reason for wanting Raleigh to
fall. Walsingham had put in place a subtle, covert strategy
for undermining Spain. Raleigh, a mere courtier who
nevertheless had the Queen's ear, advocated more brash,
direct action against the Spaniards, and Elizabeth was
listening. Furthermore, Raleigh held the lucrative patent to
settle North America, something Walsingham, who was facing
bankruptcy, coveted. Roanoke would be an excellent base for
English raiders to use in the harassment of Spanish
shipping, and Walsingham wanted control of it for his
strategy against Spain. So to Miller's mind Walsingham had
motive to ruin Raleigh. But did he arrange the sabotage of
Roanoke? Miller kept digging.

Among the documents she read were the court proceedings of
an ill-fated expedition to what is now Canada, mounted by
John Rastell in 1517. Rastell had proposed colonizing
Newfoundland. Henry VIII endorsed the idea, and the Lord
Admiral, the Earl of Surrey, helped underwrite it. But
Rastell's expedition never got past Ireland. The purser,
John Ravyn, who had been provided by Surrey, found one
excuse after another, many involving the provisioning of the
ship, for delaying progress. Miller read this and was
reminded of Fernandez. In Plymouth, England, Ravyn actually
drove the ship aground, which paralleled Fernandez's near
beaching of the Roanoke ships off Cape Fear. Finally, before
the expedition could proceed into the Atlantic, Ravyn
claimed that the season was now too far gone to continue on
to Newfoundland, and had the sailors turn out Rastell and
his company, stranding them on the Irish coast. During the
court proceedings, Surrey, the Lord Admiral, admitted
employing Ravyn to sabotage the expedition, even though he
was an underwriter.

Says Miller, "When I read the original [Rastell] court
documents, I was stunned to realize that some of the
terminology used by the saboteurs was exactly the
terminology Fernandez was using [later in Roanoke]. Like
'the summer was too far spent.' It seemed uncanny to me that
that would be the exact phrase used by Rastell." The
parallels to what happened 70 years later on Roanoke were
too close to be coincidence. "I thought, My God, it's a
copycat crime!"

Miller argues that one man, Walsingham, made it his business
to know how previous expeditions, expeditions meant to
counter Spain, had fared. That same man had access to the
court records that documented the Rastell sabotage. She goes
further in her book, building a case that it was Walsingham
who orchestrated the delays that prevented John White from
mounting a rescue mission until three years had elapsed.
(The standard explanation for the delay has been intervening
war with Spain, including the attack by the Spanish Armada.)
By the time the governor returned to Carolina, it was too
late. The colony had vanished.

Miller's case against Walsingham is detailed, elaborate, and
circumstantial. There exist no letters or journal entries in
his hand which say, "I did it. I sabotaged Roanoke to
discredit Raleigh." And the pieces of the alleged sabotage
fit together with an improbable shrewdness and precision.
History is full of conspiracy theories, but in practice most
conspiracies, even far simpler ones, rarely succeed, and if
they do, their secrecy almost always unravels and the
conspirators become known. Says Miller, "Here's my answer:
That's exactly why I think it's Walsingham. If you look at
other Walsingham operations over the years, which are
documented, it's like clever fiction. He took 18 years to
bring down Mary Queen of Scots. He is the only one who
regularly pulled off these vast, meticulous, painstakingly
thought-out schemes--it's documented that he did this."

Now convinced that White was justified in claiming sabotage,
and that she'd found the culprit in Walsingham, Miller set
out to resolve one last mystery: What became of the Lost
Colonists? By 1602 there had been five rescue missions; all
failed to find anyone. In 1602 and 1603, Raleigh outfitted
two more unsuccessful attempts. Then, in 1607, 105 settlers
sailed into the Chesapeake Bay and founded Jamestown. While
the fort there was under construction, an exploratory
mission ventured farther inland, where a man named George
Percy recorded something that astonished him: "We saw a
savage boy, about the age of ten yeeres, which had a head of
haire of a perfect yellow and a reasonable white skinne,
which is a miracle amongst savages." No one managed to
question the boy before he slipped away. A year later, 1608,
Captain John Smith (of Pocahontas fame, a story Miller
considers apocryphal) walked into Jamestown after a month in
the interior with news that Indians of the Powhatan
confederation had described to him settlements "of certain
men ... clothed like me." Explorers walking through the
country found trees with Roman letters and crosses carved in
the bark: Before White had left the colony to seek help in
England, everyone had agreed that crosses would be the
signal for distress. Smith later sent to England a map
showing not one but three white settlements--Jamestown, and
two unexplained (and to this day unlocated) settlements to
the south.

But in 1609, Jamestown informed the Crown that in December
1608 the chief of the Powhatan had confessed to the massacre
of the Lost Colonists. As Miller sifted through documents,
she concluded that this report of a massacre was not true,
and that principals in the Virginia colony knew it was not
true, or at least were suspicious enough to continue looking
for colonists. There are documents that testify to repeated
searches for survivors in the interior, searches made in
1609, months after the Powhatan's alleged "confession," and
searches still being made as late as 1650. If Jamestown was
so certain at the end of 1608 that the colonists were dead,
why were they still hunting for them months, if not years,
later? They kept hunting, Miller argues, because of
persistent reports of white people in the interior: people
who built two-story houses and kept domesticated fowl.

John White had written that the colonists "intended to
remove fifty miles further up into the maine." And once
again, much hinges on Miller's reading vs. that of the
historians. In Set Fair for Roanoke, Quinn made a
case for the colonists leaving Roanoke and venturing 50
miles north toward the bay to settle with the Chesapeake
Indians, where, he said, the Powhatan massacred them 20
years later. He imagined "the main body which we can assume
with some confidence to have settled in what is now Norfolk
County, Virginia" as eventually intermarrying with the
Indians and gradually adopting Indian dress and custom as
years went by with no mission from England.

Miller, on the other hand, again takes White as meaning what
he said: "Fifty miles into the maine" meant 50 miles into
the mainland, she says, not 50 miles north toward the bay.
This gives credence to reports of whites in the interior.
Why, she asks, have successors to Quinn clung to his theory
when no evidence has ever surfaced of any white settlers
near the Chesapeake? Meanwhile, there were reports of whites
scattered through the interior. "Such evidence can't be
dismissed," she says. "Imagine being a detective with a
colossal missing persons case, and throwing out all evidence
of sightings because those sightings do not happen to be in
the area where you think the missing people should be! I
respect Quinn a lot. It was Quinn who revived interest in
Roanoke. The only thing is, his is like any pioneering
effort. It's a great beginning, but not so great when you
look at it 60 years later."

What could account for the colonists' dispersal through the
interior? Miller recalled the evidence of the Secotan's
decimation by the first English expeditions. "I started to
look at the anthropological literature about what had
happened in other regions of the U.S. when a coastal Indian
nation came into contact with Europeans and other, more
interior nations, did not." In every case, the coastal
nations weakened, and stronger interior nations moved in on
them. In North Carolina, this meant that a fragile peace
between the Secotan (and their allies) and a menacing tribe
to the west, the Mandoag, likely would have broken down as
the balance of power shifted.

If Miller is correct, straight into this volatile situation
walked the poor, cursed Lost Colonists. Miller surmises that
it was only a matter of time before they were either caught
in a battle between tribes, or simply attacked. According to
reports from John Smith and others about how tribes in the
area fought wars, a significant portion of the colonists,
especially women and children, could have survived, only to
be taken captive as slaves. And these slaves would have been
traded along a great interior trading path that ran from
present-day Richmond, Virginia, to Augusta, Georgia. Hence
the absence of any evidence that they'd lived along the
Chesapeake coast.

But why, as Jamestown continued to search for them, had its
leaders publicly insisted that the colonists were dead at
the hands of the Powhatan? Expedience, says Miller.
Searching for survivors was arduous and dangerous, and had
not resulted in a single rescue. Jamestown was barely
surviving its own problems with disease, starvation, and
mounting hostilities with the Powhatan. An end to pressure
from London to mount more search parties would have been
welcomed. What's more, the English declared war on the
Powhatan in 1610, a war that became increasingly unpopular
in England. What better way to counter opposition than to
maintain the fiction of the poor Lost Colonists slaughtered
by the savage enemy?

Miller notes that Jamestown's report was based on a single
account of what the Powhatan had told John Smith. But report
of this confession doesn't appear in any of Smith's
writings. The sole record of it is a single official account
prepared by Jamestown's secretary, William Strachey. In his
own published works, Smith never said that the Powhatan
murdered the colonists and never alluded to any such
confession.

Roanoke: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Colony has
the endnotes and bibliography of a scholarly tome--59 pages
of the former, 20 of the latter. But it's written for a wide
audience, structured as a mystery with Miller leading the
reader along a labyrinthine narrative trail of suspicion,
speculation, sleuthing, and detection. It is not always easy
to follow her through the maze of clues, connections, and
Indian names with their multiple spellings. She seems hooked
on sentence fragments; some sections read more like her
notes than finished prose. She makes her own surmises--the
Indian attack on the Lost Colonists in the interior, the
dispersed slaves--and strains in places to make so much fit
her theory. Walsingham studied at Padua University in
Venice. Aha! More proof of his scheming nature, complete
with exclamation points. She writes: "Padua! We may have
something here. Red flag! Venice was a hotbed for the new
Machiavellian statecraft, and the university its training
ground." But each time the story's credibility stretches,
Miller comes through with a new detail that bolsters her
theory. John Smith reported survivors at some place called
Panawioc. "Panawioc," Miller found, is an Algonquian word
that means "place of foreigners."

She considers what she's done as science and is impatient
with any counterargument that doesn't explain all of the
original documents, which she regards as scientific data.
And she's correct that her critics thus far have not so much
countered her evidence as expressed unease at the confident
manner in which she enlists seemingly everything in support
of her theory. Thomas Shields, director of the Roanoke
Colonies Research Office at East Carolina University,
describes this as, "You get some really good leads and good
ideas, and then you just can't help yourself. You keep on
pushing them and pushing them, and taking them maybe a
little too far. It's not that she's wrong, it's just that
where she assumes that she's got to be right, it's not
certain." But he adds, "Her theory takes into account a
number of things that people have always wondered about. The
conspiracy thing is sexy. Hers is one good story that we
have to think about and say is a possibility, along with
other very good stories."

"People think this all sounds far-fetched," Miller concedes.
"But all of my conclusions and hypotheses are based 100
percent on primary data. You can't argue with primary data.
You can argue with my interpretation, but then you've got to
come up with a different solution that fits the data."

In Set Fair for Roanoke, David Beers Quinn wrote:
"But when all is done, a considerable exercise of the
historical imagination is necessary to bring any coherence
to the story, and, as with many historical sequences for
which only limited data survive, hypotheses only remain good
until they are superseded by better ones." Ask her to name
the weakest parts of her theory, and Miller responds, "I
think I have Walsingham. I really, really think I got the
right guy. But 400 years later, with such little data, I'll
never be 100 percent sure. I am 99 percent sure that these
people got disseminated through the Great Trading Path. But
data is so sketchy. If new journals surface and we find
something that conflicts with what I have to say, fine,
we'll throw out my theory and get a new one."